The highway to Hull - how a £355m road upgrade got stuck in the mud
Completion date has been put back 12 months
Sitting at the front of a bus full of VIPs, John Prescott was all smiles.
The then Deputy Prime Minister had good reason to be cheerful. He’d just officially opened a new £45m 7km-long dual carriageway in his own East Hull constituency. As the bus headed back to a reception party, he was asked about resolving the other outstanding congestion hotspot in Hull on Castle Street. “That’s Alan Johnson’s fucking problem,” came the reply.
Despite his fruity language, Prescott was following a Westminster convention. MPs aren’t supposed to get involved in issues specific to another’s constituency and in this case Castle Street was firmly in his Labour colleague and fellow cabinet member’s patch.
Two decades on from that exchange, it still remains a problem. Just before Christmas, National Highways announced ongoing construction at Castle Street was now no longer scheduled to be completed by Spring 2025. Instead, nearly five years since contractors started work on site, the expected finishing date was being pushed back a year.
Another 12 months of disruption will be keenly felt in Hull. The 1.5km east-west route being upgraded runs right through the city centre, connecting the A1033 dual carriageway opened by Prescott in 2002 with the A63 and, ultimately, the M62. It’s the main way to shift goods to and from the city’s port. In short, it’s Hull’s main road connection with the rest of the country.
At its heart, the project involves building a 400m long underpass for east-west traffic at what used to be a traffic-light-controlled Mytongate junction, where Ferensway - the main north-south route through the city centre - links to Castle Street and the A63.
The delay is likely to mean more partial closures, further diversions, continuing pressure on the rest of the city’s highways network, a longer hit to the local economy and extra costs. Already expected to cost an eye-watering £355m, another 12 months on site will surely see that figure increase.
While massively disappointing, the announcement was not entirely surprising. Rumours about delays had been circulating for months. Back in June, they prompted me to ask National Highways if they were true. “We are still working towards a completion date of Spring 2025,” I was told.
So what changed in the six months from June to December? The press release from confirming the 12-month delay provided little in the way of detailed explanation.
It said: “Despite working at pace, unfortunately we won’t be able to hit our previously published Spring 2025 open to traffic date. Co-ordinating the different elements of this complex scheme has taken us longer than expected. Our project team is working in a very tight constrained area. Even minor delays have a significant impact on other activities in our programme. It’s taken time to overcome ground challenges and complete the excavation stage. However, we’ve gained a greater awareness of the work we have to do.”
I’m all for simplifying extremely technical information and there’s no doubting the complex nature of this particular project but the release raised more questions. So, like Oliver Twist, I went back and asked for more. In particular, I wanted to know exactly what “ground challenges” had been encountered during the excavation ahead of the underpass being constructed and why they hadn’t been fully anticipated beforehand.
“There are very challenging ground conditions on part of the site which became apparent when our teams began working in that area. It has taken time to overcome the ground challenges and complete the excavation.” came the reply. Again, not exactly illuminating.
How could those conditions only become fully apparent once work started on excavating the ground where the underpass will eventually sit? It’s not as if there haven’t been previous problems with construction schemes going underground in Hull.
Back in the mid-1980s building a road tunnel under River Hull to provide a new access route to a vast planned new housing development on the outskirts of the city sounded like a good idea. The new road was seen as an essential piece of a huge infrastructure jigsaw slowly being pieced together. However, construction work was abandoned after two years following repeated flooding. Today debris from the tunnel is still classed as a shipping hazard while a road bridge at the same spot carries vehicles to and from Kingswood.
A decade later, another tunnel fell foul of Hull’s soggy geology. This time work halted on a new £70m sewerage tunnel when a 100m section being constructed under Hull Marina collapsed, trapping a remote-controlled tunnel boring machine named after Hull-born actress Maureen Lipman. Hours earlier, engineers has noticed water leaking from the tunnel lining. It took 16 months to retrieve poor old Maureen after liquid nitrogen at temperatures as low as minus 180 degrees Celsius was pumped into specially-designed boreholes to freeze and stabilise the ground around her to allow excavation work to start..
At this point, it’s probably worth mentioning Hull’s geology. The city not only sits in the basin of a huge flood plain but also on the very edge of the Humber. The Castle Street underpass site is just a few hundred metres from the estuary. As a result, ground water levels rapidly rise and fall with the tides. Under the surface is a layer cake of soft clay, silt and peat. The best layman’s description I’ve heard is that it’s the equivalent of a deep-filled bowl of blancmange.
Among the vast number of background documents associated with the project which are still accessible on its own website, I found two other interesting nuggets. One refers to the underpass site forming part of an old channel, a reference to the ancient course of the River Hull before its path shifted to the east following severe flooding in the River Hull valley in 1253. The second is a fleeting reference to exploratory ground water testing being carried out in 2013 on the same day as a dramatic tidal surge on the Humber caused widespread flooding in exactly the same spot. Not surprisingly, a new pumping station has been built as part of the scheme.
A clearer explanation of the risks associated with excavation work there actually emerged before it began. An article published last March in New Civil Engineer coincided with the start of digging out following the completion of ground improvement measures aimed at stabilising the immediate surrounding area.
It revealed a number of improvement procedures had been used. Will Neaves, project director for main contractor Balfour Beatty, said: “We are building a 400m long underpass is very poor ground conditions. We installed diaphragm walls along the sides, a grid of tension piles across the footprint of the underpass and a jet grout layer to form the bottom of the structure and keep the water out.”
The highly-technical procedures required for the underpass build had been determined earlier by an extensive series of site and laboratory tests and trials involving Balfour Beatty, National Highways and experts from geotechnical tunneling subcontractor Zublin.
However, it now seems even the best brains in the business ended up getting bogged down in the mud. After asking around, I spoke to someone who had been given a more detailed briefing on the delay than has so far been made public. “When they were pumping into the ground the machines were getting clogged up and would only work for short periods. They managed to resolve it but it took a while.”
Geology is also not the only unique thing about the project. The A1033/A63 itself is one of the few National Highways routes in England to slice through a city centre with responsibility for it resting with the agency and, ultimately, the government. As such, while the city council is responsible for virtually every road in Hull, it’s powerless when it comes to the busiest one of all. Although the two organisations generally work closely together, the relationship between the two has, on occasions, been a bit fractious like those jurisdiction conflicts in American TV crime shows where the local county police rub up against the FBI.
Former council leader Colin Inglis recalls councillors initially lobbying for a completely different solution to congestion on Castle Street. He said: “At the time some of us were pushing for a tunnel under the River Hull because the traffic kept stopping every time Myton Bridge was raised to let ships in and out of the river. The whole point of a tunnel was to get rid of Myton Bridge. National Highways ignored that and focused all their efforts on the Mytongate roundabout. My recollection is that we never asked for that but is is a nationally-controlled trunk road so ultimately the council’s input was minimal.”
With hindsight, a road tunnel under the River Hull probably wasn’t the best solution while Myton Bridge is physically raised far less these days because of a steady decline in river traffic passing underneath. Either way, by 2008 National Highways - or Highways England as it was called then - was focused on the Mytongate junction.
Perhaps the real £355m question in this long-running saga is why decide to lower a dual carriageway carrying 50,000 vehicles a day into Hull’s notoriously unstable big bowl of blancmange in the first place?
In the New Civil Engineer, Balfour Beatty’s technical director Michael Southall ponders this very question. “You might think it would be better not to dig a hole at all in these conditions,” he says before claiming there was no appetite to impose another flyover on the city’s skyline. It’s an important point but doesn’t tell the whole story behind the original options put forward for public consultation.
Back in November 2008, two preferred options selected from an initial shortlist of six were announced by Highways England. The estimated cost of each preferred option was deemed to be “affordable” and within the then scheme budget of £189m. Both were also regarded as “having a relatively low impact on the environment.” Of the original six options, three involved lowering the A63 into the ground while the others all proposed elevating the dual carriageway in differing lengths.
Of the two preferred options, one suggested elevating the A63 over the Mytongate junction with local north-south traffic running underneath while the other proposed what is essentially being built now.
At the time, all six options were subject of a major public consultation exercise and I clearly remember thinking another option was somehow missing. It was the elephant in the room that no-one was talking about. Nowhere in a blitz of visuals, maps, leaflets, information boards and a dedicated website was there any mention of keeping the A63 where it was at ground level and building a relatively modest road bridge above it for local traffic. Even now, I can’t understand why this wasn’t option number seven.
As it was, the responses from the public and stakeholders were illuminating. Among the latter, there certainly wasn’t any appetite for a new elevated A63 dual carriageway in that location. Associated British Ports, the Hull and Humber Chamber of Commerce and Hull City Council all supported the preferred the underground option. In its submission, the council said: “We feel that the physical and visual intrusion caused by any elevated option in what is a conservation area would be totally unacceptable and contrary to the government’s own guidelines and best practice.” Of course, the option of keeping the A63 at ground level wasn’t even on the table by then.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the only stakeholder to go against the underground option was the Environment Agency on the grounds that it would increase flood risk on the site. With the devastating 2007 floods still fresh in the memory, those concerns were shared by members of the public who took part in the consultation. Overall, 54.2 per cent said they supported the preferred elevated scheme while 33.1 per cent backed the preferred underground option.
An accompanying report on the consultation revealed one in five of those who supported the elevated option option still had concerns over the high water table and the potential flooding risk with many citing previous tunnel collapses elsewhere in Hull.
It also reflected general concerns by the public over the potential impact of construction during whatever scheme was eventually chosen. “A number of respondents indicated that they hoped that disruption would be kept to a minimum throughout the works.” Come Spring 2026, that disruption will have lasted six long years.
Hull is holding its collective breath that it really will all be over by then.